Look for Lite-On to light up the SSD scene

Tired of seeing the same old players participate in the solid state drive wars? If so, you'll be glad to know another warrior is entering the battlefield. That warrior is Lite-On, and come CES, the company that's perhaps best known for manufacturing affordable optical drives (dating back to when optical drives weren't necessarily affordable) will try its hand at making consumer grade SSDs.

Official announcement likely at CES 2015

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is just around the corner and, if some recent reports are to be believed, so is the announcement of a new generation of Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC) range of pint-sized PC kits and boards. A bunch of images said to show next-generation NUC units quietly appeared on Intel’s own website late last month, where they sat unnoticed until the folks over at ComputerBase.de stumbled on them a few days back.

High performance drives at mid-range price points

It's been about a month since Corsair first began showing off its Neutron XT solid state drive family, and at the time, the company wasn't ready to talk about pricing details. That's a secret Corsair can't keep forever -- the drives are reportedly supposed to launch to public in the coming weeks -- so last night, Corsair spilled the beans on how much its Neutron XT SSD line will street for.

Mass storage at just 3 cents per gigabyte

Solid state drives (SSD) are where it's at in terms of performance, but the reason they can't shove mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) out of the market is because of price. Even after NAND flash memory took a nose dive, the price-per-gigabyte of an HDD is far superior to that of an SDD, and when Seagate's 8TB ships, that fact will be will be underscored, highlighted, bolded, and everything else.

A plug-and-play digital microphone for superior recordings

It's been interesting to see Razer evolve over the years, branching out into new product categories rather than getting too comfortable in a singular category. Of course, gaming mice are still the company's bread and butter, but its product line has grown in multiple different directions. The latest product from Razer is the Seirēn, a plug-and-play digital microphone that's supposed to offer studio-grade recordings.

A toned down version of the Bolt II

Boutique system builder Digital Storm today unveiled its new Eclipse small form factor (SFF) gaming PC. It's essentially the poor man's Bolt II. Checking in at about half the price of a Bolt II, the Eclipse is intended to "offer a premium gaming experience at an affordable price," and to accomplish that, Digital Storm took a more value-oriented approach to the system's component selection.

Pro gamer functions of the Cougar 700K at a lower price

Cougar today announced its 500K Gaming Keyboard. In doing so, the company piled on the hype pretty high as to why its new membrane plank is roughly on par with mechanical keyboards that have become so popular today, but at a lower cost. One of the reasons Cougar makes that claim is because the 500K is supposedly "one of the extremely few real N-Key Rollover membrane keyboards" available.

Keep it hush

Do you know what's a great sound when you pass by a home theater PC, or really any type of system for that matter? Trick question -- the answer is nothing, which is what you expect to hear from a silently configured computer. To help you build one, Asus has released a passively cooled version of the GeForce GTX 750 (GTX750-DCSL-2GD5), or at least it's going to. There's a product page for the card on the company's website, just no press release or domestic retailer listing (yet) that we can find.

Faulty power cords distributed with select Lenovo notebooks could overheat and catch fire

Lenovo is recalling more than 500,000 AC power cords distributed in the U.S. and another 44,000 in Canada due the risk of overheating and burning or catching fire. The potentially affected power cords were manufactured from February 2011 to December 2011 and distributed with the company's B, G, S, U, V, and Z Series of IdeaPad laptops, as well as its B, G, and V Series of non-IdeaPad laptops.

A possible look at Samsung's Galaxy S6 specifications

The Galaxy S6 could end up being Samsung's most important smartphone release in quite some time. There's certainly a lot riding on the release -- faced with lower than expected revenues from the Galaxy S5 not selling as well as the company hoped, a few heads in management rolled during a recent restructuring effort. Samsung chief J.K. Shin managed to avoid the axe and was given another chance, though his job could be on the line if the Galaxy S6 doesn't turn things around. With that in mind, we have some possible specs of the Galaxy S6 to share.